WHAT NOVELISTS ARE FOR

A long time ago, when I happened to be living in Rye in Sussex, I had the honour of being visited by two very distinguished men; they were both Americans, indeed, they were brothers; but the type of their success seemed oddly different. One was Henry James, the novelist, who lived next door; the other was William James, the philosopher, who had just crossed the Atlantic and seemed as breezy as the sea. In fact, there was an almost fantastic contrast between the two men: the one so solemn about social details often considered trivial; the other so hearty about abstract studies generally considered dry. Henry James talked about toast and teacups with the impressiveness of a family ghost; while William James talked about the metabolism and the involution of values with the air of a man recounting his flirtations on the steamer. But though I had and have the greatest possible regard for them both, I cannot but think that a certain relative completeness, and incompleteness, in the contrast between them reveals a certain truth about two different types of letters.

I was recently rereading one of the late Harvey Wickham's exceedingly clever studies of modern thought; including the study of William James. I think the critic was mainly just about the philosophy, but not quite just about the philosopher. I do not myself think that Pragmatism can ever stand up as a serious rival to the permanent philosophy of Truth and the Absolute. But I do think that William James did really stand up as a rattling good fighter and cleaner-up of the particular sort of solemn nonsense most current in his time. He may have only indirectly served the cause of belief in belief. But he did a lot to serve the cause of unbelief in unbelief; a very wholesome object. But that is not my main point. It seems to me that where William James failed was exactly where Henry James succeeded; in making a whole scheme out of fine shades and doubtful cases. Now that can be done with a novel; for it only claims to be exceptional. It cannot be done with philosophy; for it must claim to be universal.

Pragmatism fails because it is a cosmos made out of odds and ends. But stories are better for being made out of odds and ends; especially if the ends are very odd. Recalling at random some Henry James stories, there was one about an intelligent youth who unaccountably became a sort of tame cat in the house of a couple of rich but unspeakably dull people. But it is not because he is a snob or a plate-licker; but because he is really touched by a devotion and delusion of the old couple, about their dead daughter, whose life they continue in a sort of waking dream, in which the young man figures as her lover. It is beautifully and delicately done; and it does not seem impossible. Now if we apply to this any moral philosophy on earth, however modern, however mad, we shall all shrink from laying it down as a general rule that young men ought to cadge on old men, that they ought to encourage delusions; that this ménage is a model for the normal home. But that is exactly what a novelist is for. He is not bound to justify human beings, but only to humanise them. It is for him and not the philosopher to deal with all this chapter of accidents; in which "things work out differently in practice". William James's mistake was that he did not put his notions into novels, like his brother; where such opportunism is quite appropriate. He tried to make a cosmic system out of these accidents and this opportunism; and the system is not systematic. The comparison carries a faint hint that novelists may be some use after all.